My TV is in use so I can't test this myself... but I severely doubt the game is upscaled to true 1080p. It would still be nice if the image is outputted to 1080p with some filtering versus it outputting to 480p over HDMI

Upscale is such a shitty word. It makes gullible people think that the games actually run in higher resolution, when all it really means is that it runs in the same shitty resolution except stretched over a bigger picture.

Upscale is such a shitty word. It makes gullible people think that the games actually run in higher resolution, when all it really means is that it runs in the same shitty resolution except stretched over a bigger picture.

Basically it does nothing except add some blur.

Well it does do a bit if the scaler is good. HDMI over component should clean up the image a bit as well.

Either way HDMI > Component... so even if it's not truly upscaled, it should STILL look better than a Wii.

I never noticed a difference myself, BUT after the comparison between the GC's digital component versus the Wii's component it seems plausible, at least in this case. Would be annoying to juggle between PS3 and Wii U though, so I'll be testing with both when I get my Wii U to know for sure.

If the TV is saying it's getting a 1080p signal, then it's been unscaled by the Wii U.

Plug a Wii in to a 1080p TV, and your TV will get a 480p signal which the TV will upscale to fill the 1080x1920 screen.

Originally Posted by DSix

Upscale is such a shitty word. It makes gullible people think that the games actually run in higher resolution, when all it really means is that it runs in the same shitty resolution except stretched over a bigger picture.

Basically it does nothing except add some blur.

Any non-native TV input is going to get upscaled. But how clean/ugly that scaling looks depends greatly on the device doing it. In general, HDTVs have pretty poor upscalers in them. Higher end Panny plasmsas and Bravias are pretty good, but no where near as good as dedicated scalers.

The b/c PS3 did a wonderful job of scaling PS2 games when connected to HDTVs. Far better resulting image than the same game played on a PS2 and the TV doing the scaling. Hopefully, the Wii U will be the same. I believe that in general, AMD GPUs offer decent scaling, but I might be wrong as I'm not really across PC tech.

I don't have a digital camera good enough to make a difference at home, but I can see a major difference in the scaling between my Wii and Wii U when changing inputs.

The Wii U's wii mode output actually puts a slight black border around all sides of the image. The nature of the scaling artifacts is different from the output of my Wii (using component, not composite). Colors on the Wii U side are more vibrant, less washed out by the upscale. I am not sure if one or the other is "cleaner" in terms of upscaling artifacts. But the Wii U side looks less stretched and distorted.

Verdict: I would assume the Wii U is upscaling the image before sending it to the TV. The output looks nothing like the TV's own scaler on the vanilla Wii's input.